After a period of comparative obscurity in the 25 years immediately after his death, he is now becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian composers for the piano.

[citation needed] A younger contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin, he wrote a substantial number of compositions, all of which include the piano.

[4][5] He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1891,[6] and graduated nine years later in 1900, at the age of 20, receiving the Anton Rubinstein prize, having studied under Pavel Pabst, Wassily Sapellnikoff, Vasily Safonov and Sergei Taneyev among others.

With the support of Taneyev, Medtner rejected a career as a performer and turned to composition, partly inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets.

[7] With the publication of his First Piano Sonata in F minor, he was noticed by Sergei Rachmaninoff,[1] who would remain a friend of Medtner's throughout his life, as well as a supporter of his composing.

During that time, he fell in love with Anna Mikhaylovna Bratenskaya (1877–1965), a respected violinist and the young wife of his older brother Emil.

Rachmaninoff secured him a tour of the United States and Canada in 1924, and his recitals were often all-Medtner evenings, consisting of sonatas interspersed with songs and shorter pieces.

Esteemed in England, he and Anna settled in London in 1936, modestly teaching, playing and composing, to a strict daily routine.

[9] At the outbreak of World War II, Medtner's income from German publishers disappeared and, during that hardship, ill-health became an increasing problem.

In 1949, a Medtner Society was founded in London by Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar Bahadur, the Maharajah of Mysore (the princely state in Karnataka, southern India).

Medtner, already in declining health, recorded his three piano concertos and some sonatas, chamber music, numerous songs and shorter works, before his death in London in 1951.

Medtner died at his home at Golders Green, London on 13 November 1951,[10][11] and is buried alongside his brother Emil in Hendon Cemetery.

It opens slowly with one of Medtner's best-known themes and closes with an animated coda (Allegro molto doppio movimento, in D major) based on the second subject.

The emotional center of this compact work (sixteen minutes in duration) is the Interludium: Andante lugubre: this comprises most of the development section and contains some of Medtner's loveliest harmonies.

(Russian: О чем ты воешь, ветр ночной...?, romanized: O chem ty voesh', vetr nochnoy...?

Under the title "Sonata" Medtner added a note: "The whole piece is in an epic spirit" (Вся пьеса в эпическом духе).

Geoffrey Tozer said: "it has the reputation of being a fearsomely difficult work of extraordinary length, exhausting to play and to hear, but of magnificent quality and marvelous invention."

This is also a single movement sonata-allegro form, but Allegro, dramatic and ferocious, with three themes of which one (the reminiscence from "Canzona Matinata") does not return.

Other pianists who championed Medtner's work and left behind recordings include Benno Moiseiwitsch, Sviatoslav Richter, Edna Iles, Emil Gilels, Yevgeny Svetlanov and Earl Wild.

In modern times, pianists noted for their advocacy include Ekaterina Derzhavina, Marc-André Hamelin, Malcolm Binns, Irina Mejoueva (ja), Nikolai Demidenko, Anna Zassimova, Boris Berezovsky, Paul Stewart, Dmitri Alexeev, Evgeny Kissin, Andrey Ponochevny, Konstantin Lifschitz, Daniil Trifonov, Gintaras Januševičius, Dina Parakhina, Alessandro Taverna and Paulius Andersson.

Medtner himself recorded a selection with the sopranos Oda Slobodskaya, Tatiana Makushina, Margaret Ritchie and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

In recent times Susan Gritton and Ludmilla Andrew have recorded complete CDs with Geoffrey Tozer, as has Caroline Vitale with Peter Baur.

The bass-baritone Vassily Savenko has recorded a considerable number of Medtner songs with Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Blok and Victor Yampolsky.

A handful of other singers have included Medtner songs in compilations; particularly notable are historic recordings by Zara Dolukhanova and Irina Arkhipova.

[19] Medtner's one book, The Muse and the Fashion, being a defence of the foundations of the Art of Music[20] (1935, reprinted 1957 and 1978) was a statement of his artistic credo and reaction to some of the trends of the time.

A few of the contributors were: Alfred Swan, translator of Medtner's The Muse and the Fashion into English, Ivan Ilyin, Ernest Newman, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Marcel Dupré, Russian music critic Leonid Sabeneev, Canadian pianist and close friend of the composer Alfred La Liberté, singers Margaret Ritchie, Tatania Makushina and Oda Slobodskaya, and Medtner himself via extracts from Muse and the Fashion.

The book is available in a German translation by Christoph Flamm and is notable for the two CDs it contains with original recordings of a variety of Medtner's works.

It includes letters, reviews and other documents in German, Russian, English and French, a bibliography and partial discography.

[22] The author Philip Pullman declared Medtner as his favourite composer during a short interview available on the BBC website in September 2011.